How to wipe a hard drive using Diskpart and Format

Explains how to wipe a hard drive using the Diskpart and Format commands.

There are various tools out there you can buy or download for wiping hard drives, but it's easy to do this using the built-in Windows commands Diskpart and Format. Just take the drive you want to wipe out of the computer and insert it into another computer, then open a command prompt window on the second computer and type the following commands:

Diskpart

Select Disk N

In the above command N should be the disk number of the disk you are going to wipe.

Clean

Create Partition Primary

Assign

Exit

Now type the following command where X is the drive letter assigned to the new partition using the Assign command above:

Format X: /p:1 /v:CleanDisk /y

By scripting the above series of commands you can easily wipe all data from the drive in a single pass.

Mitch Tulloch is a seven-time recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award and widely recognized expert on Windows administration, deployment and virtualization. For more tips by Mitch you can follow him on Twitter or friend him on Facebook.

The Author — Mitch Tulloch

Mitch Tulloch is a well-known expert on Windows Server administration and cloud computing technologies. He has published over a thousand articles on information technology topics and has written, contributed to or been series editor for over 50 books.